Hello, my name is Rodolpho, and I am originally from Sao Paulo in Brazil. I’m very passionate about horses and riding - it’s a big part of my life. I started to ride horses young and soon became involved in dressage sport. I rode at every level growing up: juniors, young riders, seniors.
Coming from an equestrian family, they started me in the sport when I was six years old. My grandfather had horses; then, my mom was a trainer, a national dressage judge and competed as well. From the start, I fell in love with the equestrian sport and the competition. When I was fourteen, my parents sent me to Paris for the summer to learn French and get some experience riding other horses and working in a dressage stable. I went back several more times, as well as going to Belgium and Germany.
By the time I was sixteen, I was working as a professional rider and competed in and won many youth and senior competitions, such as the Brazilian Championship, the South American Championship, and the World Cup.
In 2012, at the age of 28, I moved to a city near Paris, France, to work as a head trainer, rider, and manager of a private stable. Two years later, I wanted to try something new and decided to change careers. I was hired by a French Fashion house where I still work to this day. In my free time, I continued my athletic career.
Contracting meningitis
In the summer holidays of 2015, my mum called me to say that my dad was in the hospital. I wasn’t able to fly back to Brazil immediately, and unfortunately, my dad passed away before I could get back to Brazil. My mum and sister decided not to tell me by phone, only face-to-face once I arrived back in Sao Paulo. As you can imagine, it was a difficult time for our family. I felt like I needed to stay for a couple of weeks to help with the paperwork and get things done.
Around ten to fifteen days later, I visited the lawyer in the morning, had some lunch, and gave a riding lesson at the club for a friend. Everything was fine during the day, but I got home around four and I started to feel sick. It felt like I had the flu. My mum made dinner, but I wasn’t able to eat anything. Soon, I had a fever. In about three or four hours, it was 40° C. Also, I was vomiting. I took some pain killers and went to bed.
The next morning, I was feeling even worse. My legs and neck were hurting a lot. My mum was, of course, very worried. She’d just lost my dad, and now I was suddenly very sick. She drove me directly to hospital. I don’t remember everything that happened once I got there. One thing I do remember very clearly is looking down at my hands and seeing red spots on them. I learned that this was purpura, a rare and severe complication of meningococcal septicaemia, because of clotting in the blood vessels. I also remember they took spinal fluid twice and blood from my wrist, which hurt like hell.
The doctors and nurses at the hospital moved very quickly because they knew something was very wrong with me. I’m lucky that they knew what they were looking for because I was diagnosed with bacterial meningitis that day. And I was very lucky that my mum had brought me to the hospital very quickly because bacterial meningitis strikes fast and moves faster.
I don’t remember a lot of what happened over the next few days. Because I was having difficulty breathing, the doctors decided to put me into a medically induced coma. I later learned that while I was in a coma, the skin on my arms up to my shoulders was red and black from lack of blood flow. My legs were also red and black up past my knees. The doctors told my mum that it was best to amputate my legs above the knee. They said they’d try to save as much of my arms as they could. My mum didn't want them to amputate anything, so she insisted that they continue to treat me, but not amputate any limbs at that moment.
Apparently, there was one night while I was in the coma that required the doctors and nurses to do everything they could to keep me alive. They had to give me emergency care several times, and someone stayed by my bed for over 24 hours. But once I got through that night, my condition started improving. After another week of being kept in a coma, they decided to bring me out of it. Unfortunately, I didn't wake up and it took me another week to finally come out of the coma.